Happiness For Blessing

"You're criticizing me for not living up to your tagline. And you dismiss any criticism as further evidence of how the rest of the media persecute you. You like to pretend, Bernie Goldberg and Fox News, that the relentless conservative activism of Fox News is the equivalent of the disorganized liberal influence you find on ABC, NBC, and CBS. You may be able to detect a liberal pathogen in their bloodstream, however faint, but Fox News is such a crazy overreaction to that perceived threat. You're like an autoimmune disorder. I'm not saying the virus doesn't exist in some small quantity, but you're producing way too many antibodies. Fox News, you are the lupus of news." - Jon Stewart

A sermon I preached on March 21, 2010 on Mark 4:35-41:

Master of the Sea - Mark 4:35-41 by happinessforblessing

Sorry for the poor quality. This is a recording of a recording and will have to do for now. Feedback (both positive and negative) welcomed and encouraged!

This concludes my review of all the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year. Click here to view my final ranking.

If I had to sum up my criticism of The Blind Side in one word, it would be this: Caricature. Everything is overdone. Teachers at Michael Oher's teachers dismiss him for no apparent reason, save for one brave soul who dares to do her job. Leigh Anne Tuohy's rich lunch buddies have zero depth. Their racism stops just short of being rally-worthy. The football coach is horribly portrayed as a gutless idiot. Sandra Bullock's Southern accent is atrocious. There's a comically bad recruiting montage, complete with juvenile-level acting from actual college coaches. (By the way, why is Nick Saban shown recruiting Oher to Alabama? He was actually head coach of the Miami Dolphins at the time.) There's a scene (shown in all the previews and on the late night shows) where Mrs. Tuohy interrupts practice to inspire Michael to pretend the quarterback is her and he is to protect him as he would her. The scene is praised because it captures the psyche of the Southern woman so well. It does, but are we really supposed to believe that Michael is so dense that this is what inspires him to play great football?

There were positives. I don't mean to imply that there are not. While I do believe that Sandra Bullock's accent was over the top, she absolutely nailed the mannerisms of a Southern woman, as I noted above. Jae Head was absolutely great as the adoptive little brother SJ. The framing of the story was fine. Overall, though, TBS suffers from campiness.

It's really a shame, because the true story that lies behind the movie is inspiring and deserved better treatment. I heard many people, especially Christians (there are many references to "Christian duty" in the story, and Michael is placed in a Christian high school), lauding The Blind Side as a quality family-friendly movie. I hate the false barrier that many try to place between the "Christian world" and the "secular world," but if it exists, I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors when we try to sell mediocrity to secular society as quality. The main reason The Blind Side fails, in my opinion, is that there is virtually no ambiguity contained in the story. There is a tendency in the mainstream Christian movement to avoid shades of gray, and this is where our credibility is in question, because there is gray everywhere. 2.5/5

The Hurt Locker is a rare war movie in that it doesn't seem to have an agenda. Its primary message, "War is a drug," is explicitly stated at the beginning and hammered home throughout the entire film.

I see this primarily as a good thing, by the way. Most recent war movies delve too heavily into the "Should we be there?" question, rather than acknowledging that we are there and dealing with the issues at hand. THL wastes no time. One of the bigger name actors in the movie is cast into the role of a soldier that dies in the first 10 minutes. I imagine that some people weren't fazed by this, but it rattled me. From that point on, it seemed that no character was guaranteed to make it to the end of the movie, making the already well-shot and focused bomb-defusing scenes even more tense. There are plenty of memorable scenes, the best one being at the end where the protagonist stands in the grocery store looking at a wall of cereal boxes. How is it possible that this world and the world the rest of the movie is set in are compatible?

I have seen the tight cinematography listed in reviews as the major strength of The Hurt Locker, but to me it is the cat-and-mouse game that is played between the bomb makers and the bomb defusers. Each bomb is more complex than the last, and the interesting thing is the Iraqis will stick around to see whether or not they win. This exploration of the tactical game is rare in war movies.

I think where THL goes awry, though, is when Sgt. James reaches his breaking point. It's hard enough to believe that a three-man explosives team like this exists in the first place, but I was willing to overlook this until James makes his bad decision, and then the whole thing fell apart as unbelievable to me. There is absolutely no way that there is no CO that he reports to. The only consequence of his action was that the affected party cursed at him a little. In the large scheme of things, this inexcusable scene bumps this movie down from an all-time Top 10 war movie to merely an above-average one. It's that big of a deal for me. 4/5

I haven't posted my reviews for The Hurt Locker or The Blind Side yet. I have seen them; I just need to write them up. They will be posted later tonight or tomorrow. I wanted to get my rankings up before the actual ceremony, though. This the order that I personally rank them, not a prediction.

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Up
3. A Serious Man
4. Avatar
5. Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire
6. The Hurt Locker
7. An Education
8. Up in the Air
9. District 9
10. The Blind Side

You should know this up front: I'm a sucker for well-done Biblical allusion. A Serious Man takes the story of Job and applies it to a Jewish man in 1967, and the result is a wonderfully deep tale that questions the role of God in our affairs.

Nothing is going right in the life of Physics professor Larry Gopnik's life. He uses pithy illustrations about cats to teach complicated physics problems, then gets frustrated with a student when he focuses on the illustration rather than the math behind it. When the Junior Rabbi uses a similar hokey analogy to try to explain why everything in his life is going bad, his frustration goes. Larry doesn't "understand the math" behind why Hashem isn't bailing him out of his situation. At one point, he is standing on his roof trying to get better reception on his aerial antenna (brilliant symbolism), when he notices his neighbor sunbathing naked. Sound familiar? There are at least a dozen other allusions, and none of them seem forced or extraneous.

The most poignant is Larry's feeble quest to speak with Rabbi Marshak, the oldest and wisest of the clergymen. Like Job, he is turned away. In A Serious Man, the protagonist can see into Rabbi Marshak's office and tell that he isn't busy, but he is told there is no time for him to be seen. Eventually, Larry's son Danny is the one that is allowed to go in and speak to him, and the Rabbi is surprisingly not as serious as you might think. (The title is also spoken in the film about another character, but it works on many levels.) Marshak finds meaning in a Jefferson Airplane song, but whether or not Danny appreciates the Rabbi's attention or interpretation is in question.

I want to step aside and think about the son for a minute. I think that on one level, he is the key to the entire story. Larry is without a doubt the protagonist, but much of his final acceptance is based on his relationship with Danny. For that, I am very grateful for the way the Coen Brothers treated his part of the story. On the other hand, I absolutely hated the Bar Mitzvah scene. I read somewhere (can't find the link) that the idea of a kid being high at his own Bar Mitzvah was the original idea that the screenplay came from, but it seems like the script evolved enough that this scene came from a completely different movie. I thought it was wholly unnecessary, and so were Danny's friends that ride the bus with him. Maybe there's a way that they fit in that makes sense, but I've been thinking about this movie constantly for three days and it continues to bewilder me. In fact, I don't think I've been so internally conflicted about the quality of a movie before.

My conclusion (subject to change) is that A Serious Man is a brilliant movie that gets bogged down by a couple of extraneous plotlines, but it's still very much worth a viewing. The ending shot alone (a whirlwind, which some people claim whispers right before the credits roll) is worth the experience. 4.5/5

I didn't want to give Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire a chance. From what I knew about the plot (a girl with a bad home life is redeemed by education), I had seen this movie before. I was partly right. There's not a whole lot in the story that differentiates it from the crowd of inspirational movies of the same ilk. There's a teacher who goes out of her way to give Precious individual attention, even though she's been left behind by the system. A social worker and a nurse fill the same roles, and because of them Precious gains the confidence she needs to take care of herself. Much of her motivation comes from her new child. It's the same old stuff. And you know what? It's a decent story. Why else would producers green light so many films with that same plot?

There are two things that make Precious stand out from all those other cookie cutter movies: the first is the way director Lee Daniels handles Precious' first person account. Daniels slips in between reality and fantasy throughout the narration and exposition of the film, to great effect. Even during the lowest moments of Precious' life (and boy, are they low), she is daydreaming about how it could be better. The dreams are vivid and somehow both far-fetched and realistic. What this allows Daniels to do is inject hope into an utterly hopeless situation without cheapening or watering down the story. I also appreciated the use of the handheld camera in certain situations to emphasize where Precious' focus was (although it tended to be distracting in parts).

The other distinctive feature of Precious is the realistic depiction of the moral ambiguity of the secondary characters. Daniels chooses not to paint the teacher and the social worker and the nurse as merely perfect selfless robots, but as normal people trapped in the system who happen to be performing extraordinary heroic acts on Precious' behalf. This ambiguity, personified especially by the performances of Paula Patton, Mariah Carey (yes, that Mariah Carey), and Lenny Kravitz (yes, that Lenny Kravitz) is what pushes Precious from good to great. 4.5/5